Articulating goals and monitoring progress towards goals has long been an important way to assess effectiveness or achievement. In the name of "program evaluation," many community groups, organizations, and larger institutions have adapted goal-oriented methods to assess, improve, and justify their program practices. This panel will present goal-based evaluation projects that measure effectiveness at two levels of analysis: the organizational level and the individual level.

The first project represents efforts of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to evaluate a statewide initiative in Illinois to provide services to victimized women. In this example, staff from over 75 programs in communities across the state were mandated to participate in the development of *standardized* goals and outcomes of their services to survivors of rape and intimate partner violence. In developing a goal-based plan for assessing the domestic violence and sexual assault programs throughout Illinois, the UIC Research Team took a collaborative approach with service providers to give them voice in the identification of goals and objectives and in creation of the measurement tools. This presentation will discuss the process by which university researchers involved the community organizations in these efforts.

The second project consists of a school-based intervention, also implemented by an interdisciplinary team, to improve the academic and career achievement of minority students with disabilities. This project focuses on *individualized* goal-setting and goal attainment as a way to measure, again, a larger intervention's ability to provide support, instruction and assistance to these individuals. Individualized goal setting and goal attainment were used to measure the effects of a school-based intervention. This type of assessment allows for individual-level progress analysis, as well as program-level analysis. This presentation will include a discussion of the pragmatic, programatic, and methodological issues involved in doing individualized goal attainment assessment and its multiple applications in community research.